The Hard Problem is Stoppard's problem with science

After a long wait and a great track record transmuting science into art, Tom Stoppard’s new play takes on the hard problem of consciousness – and loses

As I got up to leave at the end of The Hard Problem, a man in the seat behind me was behaving rather strangely. Weeping and smiling at the same time, he was clearly undergoing some profound form of conscious experience.

Well, what a bit of luck for a reviewer. Here, under my nose, was a demonstration of the so-called “hard problem” of consciousness. Physical processes&colon; sound and light were entering the man’s ears and eyes and combining in some way in his brain to produce subjective feelings that only he could experience.

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But why? Why do we experience things at all? This is the hard problem coined by philosopher David Chalmers back in the 1990s. It is ostensibly the subject of Tom Stoppard’s first new play in nine years, and the last to be directed by Nicholas Hytner as head of London’s National Theatre.

In the case of the emotional man behind me, the answer turned out to be simple – on one level. He was the father of lead actor Olivia Vinall, who had been fabulous, pretty much carrying the play and appearing in almost every scene. What the man was displaying was overwhelming pride in his daughter’s performance.

Overblown?

A real explanation of consciousness, of course, is by no means so easy to come by. But what was irritating about The Hard Problem was the weight it gave to the hard problem. A good chunk of neuroscientists and philosophers now think the problem has been overblown, for example Patricia Churchland or Giulio Tononi.

And to me there is more than a whiff of anti-science here, since it argues that we will never be able to explain the conscious experience. Indeed that feeling, that some things are beyond explanation, pervaded the play. One character even resorts to Hamlet’s well-worn “there are more things in heaven and earth” line.

All that wouldn’t matter if there was something else – a thrilling narrative or empathy with the characters – but these were sadly, and surprisingly, lacking.

I had been excited to see this play since I loved Stoppard’s masterpiece Arcadia, which uses science, and particularly physics and mathematics, to infuse and inform a deeply affecting and profound script.

His touch in Arcadia is sublime, but in The Hard Problem we are served up science in ladles. Some parts even feel like slightly wittier rewrites of textbooks or sixth-form debates&colon; not what you expect from a master like Stoppard.

For example, there is a lot of exposition about game theory and the prisoner’s dilemma, natural selection and especially on how morality and altruism can arise. In fact, despite the play’s title, the major concerns of the protagonist seem to be about evolutionary explanations of behaviour rather than about the nature of consciousness.

Buffer than Dawkins

The story follows Hilary (played by Vinall), a young psychology student hoping to land a PhD position at the prestigious Krohl Institute for Brain Science. Her tutor Spike (Damien Molony) is a kind of caricature Richard Dawkins – though significantly more buff.

Most of the exposition takes place between these two, with Hilary putting forward the traditional arguments against a materialist explanation of the world, and Spike caustically rebutting them. Raphael’s The Madonna and Child is, he says, better named “woman maximising gene survival”. Scientists can’t appreciate art, you see.

Stoppard clearly does want a dust-up. There is a great anti-science rant in Arcadia, but at the end you are still left amazed at his achievement, feeling you have been given a glimpse into some of the profound secrets of the universe. But with The Hard Problem it’s different. You don’t make much of an emotional connection with the characters, apart from Hilary, who has a moving subplot about a daughter she had to have adopted.

For me the attacks on science were unnecessary and ill-formed. “Where in the brain is metaphor happening?” asks Hilary. “Where is accountability and free will?” These don’t show up in a fMRI scan, she says. In fact metaphor may well show up in scans and so do all sorts of interesting aspects of our inner lives, including areas where we operate theory of mind, the ability to see another person’s point of view.

No one is saying that brain scans will explain consciousness, but I can’t understand those who seem to want to mock what neuroscientists are discovering. Some people are afraid that we lose something if we “reduce” aspects of our inner lives to blobs on a brain scan – in the case of metaphors to a location in the right inferior frontal gyrus. I think we gain something.

There’s lots more. Stoppard seems to channel the philosopher Thomas Nagel, (he mentions Nagel in the programme notes), who asserts that mental processes are different from physical ones, and so are not subject to natural selection. To many, this opens the door to the supernatural.

And Stoppard’s characters are troubled by how morality can evolve, when there are fascinating examples of altruism in chimps and a sense of justice in monkeys. In short, the things Stoppard worries about don’t really seem to be problems.